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Translations
Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York, By Frank X. Walker. Paper,
$15.00
Review by
Tom Pynn
Frank
X. Walker has imagined the journey of York, body servant slave to William Clark
of the Corps of Discovery (1803-1806) fame. York’s three-year journey is an
awakening into freedom that speaks across the silence of two hundred years
giving a soteriological voice both to Affrilachian (descendents of Africans living in Appalachia)
history and others, a poetic narrative of human freedom by telling “the whole
truth / when it is said an done.” The hard facts of
York’s slave existence—his own enslavement to a man whom Jefferson can trust,
but who shows little if any humanity to York or his wife Rose who must live on
Clark’s brothers’ plantation—remain even as York becomes aware of his own
freedom.
Paradoxically, it is the brute facts of one’s
existence that is the starting point for the possibility of transcendence.
Imagining York looking out onto the Pacific Ocean in the book’s opening poem,
“Wind Talker,” Walker writes,
As I watch fish the size of cabins dance in the
air
An splash back in the water like chil’ren playing
I think ‘bout her and if we gone ever be free
Then I close my eyes an pray
That I don’t live long enough
To see Massa
make this ugly too.
It is when we
are not free that freedom appears to us as possibility. As the above passage suggests, when one is
conscious of one’s own freedom, then one cannot help but desire the freedom of
others.
York’s experience of the sacred in
the immanent shows him that one can be at home in the world despite struggle
and suffering. Walker imagines that York’s first sightings of “the water fall
at M’soura”, “a buffalo stampede,” and looking down
“from top / a Rock Mountains,” and eventually the infinite seeming Pacific
Ocean was to him “like church.” In the poem “Respect House” York sees how even
in the structure of the teepee, “the pine frames pointing / an
stretching to the sky in such a way / it remind even a small man to bow / his
head an stay close to the earth.” These
disparate examples of wonder in the face of brute wild being are juxtaposed
with the facts of human beings in the wilderness at the mercy of the
often-rough terrain, un-navigable waters, and unforgiving climate. By doing so, Walker eschews the temptation to
romanticize nature and indigenous cultures.
While
we can’t always choose the situations of our lives, it remains that a life one
makes as one’s own is a life freely lived. In “Aurora Borealis,” a poem appearing
in the last pages of the book, Walker imagines York’s awakening to freedom when
he wonders “for the first time / How I can leave my
mark / in the world.” It is by choosing
one’s acts and one’s own limits and thereby one’s mode of being with others,
not by adhering to some external absolute such as “slave”—“All my life I been
told / that my big nose an wooly hair / was ugly
beastly things”—that one expresses one’s freedom in an authentic, concrete
way. In spite of York’s urge to freedom,
however, the slave system reasserts itself as the discoverers return to the
east: “The truth seemed to stretch so / that by an by I seem to disappear from
they tongues / as if I had never been there.”
This
imaginary interpretation of York’s life into freedom and struggle against
oppression is the very stuff of life and it is just as important that stories
be told not only for those of Affrilachian descent,
but also for all of us who face the daily threat of homogenization by
impersonal forces whose only intent is power over others. Thus, Buffalo Dance stands in the
tradition of resistance poetry in which the brute facts of oppression are
brought out into the light of day, given voice, so that the possibility of an
open future can emerge. For freedom to
be free, oppression must be resisted at all costs.